Behind me, the van’s engine turned over and then roared. Headlights flared on, pinning me to the dark background of trees. I looked over my shoulder to see the van lurch forward. For a second I just stood there, mouth slightly open. He has a spare set of keys, I thought. Then I moved, stepping quickly off the road and behind a large oak. The van jerked to a stop ten feet away, the engine rumbling. I looked around the tree to see Greer’s face through the windshield, his lips curled back in a snarl. The trees were too big and too close together for him to drive between them and run me down. He raised a middle finger, and then the van was moving backward, turning tightly to the left before jerking again to a stop and then moving forward. It completed the turn and drove away from me into the night. “Damn it,” I said, staring at the red taillights winking at me. Greer had left me in the middle of nowhere, and he had my phone. At least the phone was locked, so he couldn’t call Kelly to warn him. Unless he had his own phone. Sighing, I turned and resumed my walk down the road toward whatever was waiting for me at the end of it. Snow crunched beneath my feet, and my face stung with the cold.
I was just beginning to think that Greer’s estimate of a quarter mile was off—I had walked more than that, I was sure of it—when the road hooked to the right, snaked between a pair of pines, and then opened into a snow-covered yard backed by a long ranch house. The house was trim and neat without being fussy, white siding on a brick foundation, a small covered porch shading the front door. A light shone on the porch, revealing a pair of empty wooden rocking chairs flanking the closed door.
Staring at the house, I walked right into a waist-high sign planted to the left of the driveway. It was oval with curled black text on a white background: “Ollie’s Orchids.”
I stepped to the side of the sign and moved behind a smaller pine tree, peering at the house. There were no other lights on besides the porch light, no cars in the yard. But I could see where tire tracks ate into the snow around the left-hand side of the house, so I sidled that way, trying to keep behind the trees as I went, my eyes on the house the whole time as I made my way around the back.
A small floodlight mounted over the back door of the house illuminated a cluttered backyard. A pickup truck, dark and empty, was parked beside a stack of firewood. Beyond the firewood stretched a long glass building—a greenhouse. I could hear a fan running over there—probably a heater. I could see nothing through any of the house’s back windows. The truck made me cautious, though, and Greer had assured me that Kevin Kelly would be home.
Unbidden, the memory of my father’s words from years earlier surfaced. In times of crisis, a man’s instinct is to do one of two things: retreat to a place of safety, or gather up his strength and hurl himself headlong into the fray. I walked back around to the front of the house, stepped up onto the porch, and knocked loudly on the front door.
I didn’t hear footsteps or any other indication that someone was inside, but suddenly the door was pulled open. Startled, I stepped back.
Kevin Kelly was standing before me. He was taller than I remembered. He had a mop of curly hair and a week-old beard ringing his round face. He was wearing jeans, a dirty long-sleeved tee shirt, and a pair of wire-framed specs. “Matthias,” he said. “Come in.” He turned and walked into the house, leaving the door open behind him. I hesitated, and Kevin was swallowed in the shadows past the foyer. His voice floated out of the darkness. “Close the door behind you. I’m not paying to heat the front yard.”
I walked into the house and pulled the door shut behind me. Inside it was dim, the air still and close. At the back of the foyer, Kevin turned left down an unlit hall, and after a moment I followed. As I passed a closed door, I could both hear and feel a steady, muffled hum, as if a large piece of machinery were throbbing nearby behind thick walls. Then I entered a well-lit kitchen, a room with low wooden beams overhead, the stove and refrigerator, and what I presumed was the back door on the wall to my right. To the left was a heap of broken furniture, half covering a door that presumably led to one of the front rooms off the foyer. In the middle of the kitchen, Kevin stood by a square wooden table. I now noticed his tee shirt had a picture of a cartoon moose with skis, under which was the caption “Chase the Moose.” He was scratching his right arm. “Rash,” he said. “Occupational hazard. Don’t know if it’s from the plants or the nutrients. Anyway.” He indicated one of two straight-backed chairs. “Have a seat.” His voice was just as I had remembered—slightly nasal, assured, the voice of a man who knows exactly what he is doing.
I sat in the chair, facing him across the table, and he settled into the other chair, still scratching his arm. A light fixture overhead shone in tight white circles on his spectacles, giving him the look of a benevolent, otherworldly creature, eyes ablaze with silver light. Then he leaned forward, and I could see behind his specs a pair of dark eyes that gazed curiously at me, in the way someone might watch a strange new animal in a zoo.
“So,” I said. My lips were dry, and when I licked them, they stung. “Kevin. Good to see you.”
Kevin smiled and leaned his elbows on the table, bringing his hands together as if in prayer, and regarded me through his specs. I realized that Kevin had maneuvered me to sit with my back against a wall while he sat between me and the only two exits: the back door and the hall we had walked down. Sweat prickled in my armpits. Then I recalled Greer’s baton in my coat pocket, and I drew some comfort from that.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” I said.
“Security cameras,” Kevin said. “Front and back doors. Saw you tiptoe across my front lawn and peek around back.” He cracked his knuckles and continued to regard me.
“Okay,” I said after a long pause. “Now what?”
Kevin scratched his arm again in a preoccupied sort of way. “Now you tell me why you’re here,” he said.
I realized belatedly how stupid this was. I was alone, in an isolated house somewhere outside of Charlottesville, with no cell phone. With a casual bravado I didn’t feel, I said, “This how you treat all your visitors?”
Kevin was grinning now. “Just the ones who are trespassing in the middle of the night. Or were you interested in buying some orchids?”
I looked blankly at him. He seemed disappointed.
“Ollie’s Orchids?” he said. “The sign out front?”
“Missed that,” I managed to say. “Who’s Ollie?”
“Olivia. Woman I bought the business from.”
“Which business?” I asked without thinking. Shit.
Kevin’s grin slowly drained off his face, and he now appraised me like a puzzle he needed to work out. He looked like a graduate student in his tee shirt and jeans, specs, and scruffy beard. “Ah,” he said. “Well, there it is. Which business. I bought the orchid business from Olivia. She wanted to retire, move to Florida. Her father built this place back in the fifties.”
I said nothing. Kelly scratched his arm again, noticed it, stopped.
“But you’re not growing orchids,” I said.
He considered me. “No, I’m not growing orchids. And you, you’re teaching at Blackburne.” The way he said “Blackburne” suggested a sense of loathing that had not been in his voice before.
I took a minute to process this. “Why?” I managed.
He frowned slightly. “Why grow what I grow?” he said. “I’m good at it. It’s lucrative.”
“No, I mean why sell at Blackburne?”
Kevin’s eyebrows went up. “Why? Why the hell not?”
“Just seems like a lot of effort,” I said, keeping my voice at a casual register. “I mean, you’d get better sales in cities, at colleges. Blackburne’s isolated. It’s—”
“Do you ski, Matthias?”
I stared. “What?”
“Ski. It’s a beautiful sport. Trying to go as fast as you can without falling down or running into anything. There’s a kind of purity to it. A contest between you and the slope.”
I looked at the cartoon moose on his tee shi
rt—it was grinning madly as it apparently zoomed down a snowy hill—and tried to formulate a response.
“People ski for lots of reasons,” Kevin was saying. “Because other people do it and they’re like lemmings. Or because they think it makes them cool.”
“Or they like the clothes,” I said, trying to keep up my end of the conversation. “All that neon.”
Kevin smiled appreciatively, a parent indulging a wayward child. “Or they like the sport of it, the contest,” he said. “The rush as you fly down the side of a mountain fast enough to bash your brains out if you scrape a tree or hit a rock. And every time, something’s different. The snow pack is thicker, or the moguls icier, or the wind is blowing in your face instead of at your back.”
“It’s a game,” I offered.
Kevin nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “That’s it. A game.” He waved a hand around him. “Which is what this is. A game with a nice payout. But instead of a mountain, I’m playing against people.”
“I don’t—”
“People,” he said louder, “with their weaknesses and addictions and their need to take anything to make themselves feel better. People with their bullshit rules and narrow minds. But I provide a service that people want. You know how many customers I have who smoke because they’re sick and nothing else works? Cancer patients, people in constant pain.”
“Like Pelham Greer,” I said. I wondered how quickly I could get the baton out of my pocket if I needed to.
Kevin jabbed a finger at me. “My point exactly. Pelham Greer. There’s a guy who got injured in the service of his country, a country whose government won’t pay for a surgery that could make his life infinitely better. And that same government deems illegal the one thing that makes him feel better, that gets rid of his headaches. Back-ass-ward. Medical marijuana, my friend. It’s the future. Hell, it’s here now.”
A slow-building emotion turned over sluggishly in my chest. It took me a moment to realize what it was: anger at Kelly’s self-justification. “It’s not just pot,” I said. “What about the oxy, the Vicodin? And you aren’t selling to cancer patients at Blackburne.”
Kevin narrowed his eyes. He reached below the table for his waist—I thought he was scratching his stomach—and when he brought his hand back above the top of the table, I saw that he was holding a knife. It was broad, with a serrated edge like a shark’s mouth, the other edge polished and gleaming so I could see, even in the weak light, the sweep of the blade curve upward to a point. It looked like something you could use to kill and butcher a wild hog.
“No,” Kevin said softly. “I’m not. Which makes me a bona fide drug dealer to children. But there are reasons to do something other than altruism, or profit. Do you know what Blackburne kicked me out for, Matthias? I was caught having sex with a girl from Chatham Hall. We were on the golf course, and Mr. Downing comes around the hedges with a flashlight and sees us just fucking away on the ninth hole. I didn’t lie or get drunk on campus or get in a fight. I was getting laid. It was consensual, we were both eighteen, but her parents had a shit fit. Nothing they could do, legally. But Blackburne kicked me out. Said I’d ‘crossed the line’ one too many times. I was going premed to Richmond, but when I was expelled, they rescinded my acceptance. I had to repeat senior year at another school, apply to college all over again.” Kevin’s voice grew even quieter. “I begged them. Begged them to let me stay at Blackburne. And they told me to fuck off with six weeks left to graduation.” His eyes gleamed with cold fury. “I was wronged, Matthias. And you should understand that. We were both wronged. Blackburne laid down a black mark on each of us.”
I stared at him, unable to speak. He leaned forward. “You know what I mean, don’t you,” he said. “You ever feel that if things were just a little different, you’d be set? If just one thing were different, your problems would be gone?” He smiled grimly. “Course you do. Your life has never been the same since your roomie disappeared. That’s your one thing. Well, Blackburne is that one thing for me. ‘Prep school.’ Prepping for what? Go to college, get a degree, become successful? How many Blackburne grads went to college and now sleep on their parents’ sofa? All that crap about honor, work ethic, achievement? Horseshit. So fuck ’em.”
As I sat in that kitchen and continued to stare at Kevin Kelly, I realized, with a sickening drop of the soul, that this infuriated, bespectacled drug dealer across the table was not so different from me, that with a few twists and turns in my own life, or perhaps only one—like being kicked out of Blackburne—I could easily have turned into what he was: self-indulgent, cruel, and vindictive, a damaged man who took out his fear and pain on others. What was even worse was the realization that perhaps I had been that man, could still be.
Then Kevin leaned closer, so that I could see the pores on his cheeks, his eyes behind his specs wide and intense. He raised the knife in his hand, blowing away every other thought in my head except for a bright yellow fear. “Now tell me,” he said, “why you are here.”
“Fritz,” I said.
He seemed taken aback. “Fritz?” Then he suddenly laughed. “The clown,” he said. “Ah, fuck. You talked to Greer, didn’t you?”
“What . . . clown?”
He shook his head dismissively. “He told you how to get up here? Greer?”
“I made him drive me up here. He said—”
“Hold on,” he said. “Hold the fuck on. You had Greer drive you up here?”
Maybe I could shove the table at him, give myself an extra second or two to get out the baton. “He brought me in his van,” I said. “I made him stop and let me out a little ways down the road so I could walk up here. He drove off and left me, I don’t know—”
“Why would Greer drive you up here?” he asked.
“Do you know where Fritz is?”
“Why the fuck would Greer—”
“Do you know—”
“Shut up!”
“—where Fritz is?”
“Did you bring the cops? Did you call the fucking police?”
“No! I didn’t—”
He was so fast, I didn’t have a chance. One second he was shouting at me from across the table, and the next he was on his feet and right next to me, the knife pointing down at my face. My fingers twitched for the baton, but he put the point of his knife right up to my nose and with his other hand batted my fingers away from my pocket. As he reached into my pocket with his left hand and fished around, all I could see was the knife a couple of centimeters from my eyes. Bizarrely, I thought of teaching Oedipus Rex last fall, and how my students had been gruesomely fascinated by how the proud Greek king had stabbed out his own eyes. Jesus God, don’t blind me, I thought. Then Kevin pulled the baton out from my pocket, glanced at it, and threw it onto the floor behind him, where it fell with a loud clatter and rolled underneath the refrigerator.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” he asked. “Because I will cut you up and bury you alive where animals will find you and snack on your balls.”
“No, listen,” I said, desperation in my voice. “They fucked me, Kevin. Greer fucked me. He set me up, and the school believed him. They didn’t even try to listen to me. But I’ve got proof that Greer did it. Then he said you knew where Fritz was, and I told him to bring me here, or I’d call the cops. I—”
“What proof?”
“I . . . He talked about planting drugs in my desk, selling to students. I recorded him saying it. It’s on my iPhone.” Then a thought shone in my mind, a bright warm light that drew me to it like a moth. “You could listen to it. It’s on the Memos app. He doesn’t say anything about you on it—he told me that later, after I’d stopped recording. You could use that. We could send him to jail.”
He raised an eyebrow. “We?”
I drew a shaky breath. “I want in,” I said. “On selling. At Blackburne.”
He laughed, incredulous. “You do think I’m stupid.”
“No! Look, Blackburne tried to ruin my life, Kevin. I went to jail. They took
me out of my dorm in handcuffs, in front of students. But if they realize I didn’t do it, that it was Greer, then he’ll get fired and I’ll be set. I’ll be pure as fucking snow, Kevin. The school will freak out about lawsuits, or, or they’ll be scared I’ll write a book. That’d terrify them. They hate anything that could hurt their reputation. They’d practically beg me to come back and teach. And once I’m there, fuck them. I want in. I’ll help you. You can have my phone, do whatever you want with it.”
Kevin looked at me as if I were raving. But he wasn’t telling me to shut up or doing anything with the knife. He had even pulled it back a few inches from my face.
“Listen to the recording I made,” I insisted. “Greer said that you know where Fritz is. And . . . I want to know. I want to know where Fritz is. Just . . . please—”
“Shut up.” Kevin stood there, calculating. Abruptly he held out his left hand, his right still holding the knife. “Give me your phone,” he said.
“I—” Then I remembered. “I don’t have it. Greer took it. He made me give it to him before he drove me here. Call him and ask. Call my phone if you want. Or his. Whatever. He’ll tell you—”
“Shut up,” Kevin said again. I could almost see things moving into place in his head, facts and perceptions rearranging themselves like so much furniture. Then he pulled out a cell from his jeans. “What’s your number?”
I told him, and he dialed it into his phone with one hand, the other still holding up the knife. Maybe I could rush him . . . and get stabbed in the gut, or the face.
“Stay here,” Kevin said, holding the phone up to his ear. “Don’t fucking move.” He turned and walked out of the kitchen and into the back hall. Clearly he wanted to talk to Greer in private. I let out a long, shaky breath. My hopes didn’t exactly rise once Kevin left, but they lifted a bit. I figured Kevin would talk to Greer to corroborate my story with the voice recording. What Greer would have to say, I didn’t know. And I didn’t think for a second that Kevin would truly consider my insane offer. But it gave me time. The problem was, I had no idea what to do next. Maybe I could reach the baton under the refrigerator, or find a knife of my own in a drawer? Or I could run out the back door. I recalled Kevin saying he had security cameras, but I could hide in the woods.
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